Every purchase you make through these Amazon links supports DVD Verdict's reviewing efforts. Thank you!

All Rise...

Appellate Judge Tom Becker believes it madness to try and stare down John Travolta.

The Charge

"You were a good lover."—Assault case against Joe
Dallesandro faces a possible setback

The Case

Using tied bedsheets, a man climbs from a window and scales down a wall. In
his tight tank top and jeans, he looks like an escapee from a Sergio Valente ad.
But this is no foppish model; it's Gio (Joe Dallesandro, Trash), a master criminal.

Although he's a lifer, Gio somehow lucked out by being placed in a prison
that has one guard, no barbed wire fences, no dress code, and sturdy sheets. On
top of that, his escape isn't even discovered until the next day, since that's
when the "urgent bulletin" blares on the radio.

Anyway, Gio jogs from the prison and happens upon a guy loading things into
his car. Gio sneaks up and conks the guy with a rock. But the guy has a friend
who comes after Gio with a pitchfork! Unfortunately, the guy must have an
optical astigmatism, since he can't seem to connect the fork to Gio's barely
moving form. Gio wrests control of the pitchfork, and…well, let's just
say, he gets the car.

Gio—who incongruously sports a big tattoo that says "Joe"
(which would be like Steve McQueen sporting a big tattoo that said
"Esteban")—drives to a remote little house. It seems he's buried
300 million lira in the fireplace, and now he's here to collect. Unfortunately,
the owners of the cottage show up for a vacation week end: Sergio (Gianni
Macchia, The Italian Connection);
his wife, Liliana (Patrizia Behn, Play Motel); and her slutty sister,
Paola (Lorraine De Selle, Cannibal
Ferox).

This happy family unit is none too happy. Sergio and Paola are having an
affair, something even the dimwitted Gio figures out—well, he does spy
them carrying on through a conveniently open window. The only person who doesn't
figure this out is Liliana, but she has sex with Sergio the night they arrive
while Paola masturbates in the next room; I think Gio watches all that too.

So, not only is Gio the only one not having sex, but there's that pesky 300
million lira buried in the fireplace. There's only one thing to do: assault the
women and dig up the hearth.

Only, the whole "assault" business gets murky when it's followed
up with shared cigarettes and whispered endearments.

That is pretty much the size and substance of Madness, an anemic
effort from director and writer Fernando Di Leo.

Madness is a low-rent affair from start to finish. It's not
interesting visually, what little action there is seems tagged on, and the
actors aren't engaging enough to make the psychological aspects work. The score
is recycled from Di Leo's vastly superior Caliber 9, and the same
soundtrack that added a dimension to the earlier film just seems out of place
here.

There's a lot of sex, but none of it is especially compelling. Inexplicably,
the only actor who doesn't get naked is Dallesandro. I don't understand. This is
the second Italian exploitation movie I've seen with Dallesandro in which he
didn't get naked, the other being Killer
Nun. How could a guy whose claim to fame in America was walking around naked
in Warhol movies—he even had an erection in Flesh, for heaven's
sake, I believe the first such occurrence in a non-porno—how could he go
to Europe, where everyone walked around naked in exploitation films and be the
only one not walking around naked? It's pruriently mind boggling. On top of
that, he's dubbed (obviously, since this is an Italian language film), meaning
that his distinctive Brooklyn accent isn't here either.

Stripped of the accent and unstripped of the clothes, we're left with a
short, athletic-looking guy who stares a lot and is oddly graceless. His
movements seem forced and awkward; out of his New York artgrind milieu, he seems
like just another amateur.

Di Leo, who choreographed exhilaratingly violent set pieces in films like
Caliber 9 and Rulers of the City, seems to have lost his mojo
here. The fight between Dallesandro and the guy with the pitchfork is
ridiculously ungainly; people do things like throw pick axes at each other, run
naked to escape, and have slap fights with kung-fu movie sound effects. It's all
just so cheesy.

Perhaps the most impressive and macabre aspect of
Madness—besides the Olympic-level volume of sex acts—is the
big, grinning poster of Saturday Night
Fever-era John Travolta that adorns the wall and ends up pulling focus
throughout the film. Forget Laura; forget Rebecca; forget everything you know about
Dorian Gray. If you want to see a movie in which everything revolves around a
portrait—well, a poster—then Madness is it. Like a beatified
icon courtesy of Tiger Beat, Travolta knows all and sees all, his eyes
seemingly following the action, what there is of it. Sadly, even just as a
picture on the wall, Travolta is more charismatic than any of the actors
here.

Raro offers a typically good technical presentation—the image is
overall solid, though soft in spots, and the mono audio track does the
trick—but scrimps on supplements. Besides some on-screen text info on Di
Leo, the only supplement comes by way of an illustrated booklet with an essay by
Eric Cotenas of Cineventures. I would think that for American audiences,
particularly those interested in cult films, Dallesandro might be a selling
point, and an interview with him would certainly have boosted my opinion of this
disc.

The Verdict

My first experience with Di Leo was the fantastic Fernando Di Leo Crime
Collection that Raro released in 2011. It not only represented the best work
Di Leo did as a director, but the best work I've seen from Raro. Subsequent Di
Leo films that I've watched—including Slaughter Hotel and Loaded
Guns—haven't really lived up to the expectations set by the earlier
ones. Madness doesn't do anything to burnish my regard for Di Leo or
Raro.